The bargain wine that’s become an internet phenomenon
telegraph.co.ukBarbadillo was the first bodega to put en rama on the label, in 1999. A single lot of four half-bottles from this original en rama bottling realised £613 at Christie’s at the end of last year, yet the origins of en rama lie far away from auction houses and international fine wine markets.‘If you go to Jerez in Spain, you’ll see people taking a plastic bidon and filling it with sherry from the keg and taking it home.
So the idea was to create something as close to that [experience] as possible,’ says wine consultant Natasha Hughes MW, who wrote her Master of Wine dissertation on the subject.
Hence the term en rama, which translates roughly as ‘on the branch’, the thinking being that this sherry retains a connection to the barrel in the bodega.En rama sherry is treated more gently than most commercial sherries.
It’s usually sold as being ‘unclarified and unfiltered’, though Hughes says that, when she questioned 14 en rama producers on their production methods back in 2014, three were fining the sherries (gently, using egg whites) and most were filtering them, but only lightly, ‘to remove things like pebbles and twigs and eliminate the yeast’.
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